A K12 education blog exploring innovative school design and classroom practices that are able to prepare student learners for tomorrow's world, with a special emphasis on how technology is playing a role in this process.

Sunday, August 5, 2012

Picture
students as they run the simulated Lemonade Stand. They are faced with a
myriad of entrepreneurial choices. Should they order more lemons?
Raise prices? Produce quantities in bulk? Whether in business or
biology, educational simulations aid the shift from students’ recall to
the application of knowledge through decision-making. Research backs up
the increase in student learning. While these types of simulations advance learning, they need to go one step further. The
nature of their set-up and programming is algorithmic. Good choices are
rewarded; poor choices punished. Assuming that the decision in question
has a guaranteed ‘correct’ choice, this is helpful in allowing students
to practice decision-making, and then receiving the immediate feedback.
However, real-world decisions are seldom so black and white. We need
to tap into web 2.0 technologies to develop these simulations further -
allowing a student to make decisions and then be immediately evaluated
by peers (and the public), while simultaneously allowing the student to
act as an evaluator of his peers’ ideas. We need to mimic the real
world where decisions are judged by the public for their merit and
feedback does not exclusively rely upon a pre-programmed equation (or on one teacher’s judgement).More
importantly, with such a premise, tomorrow’s simulation can more
effectively place students in nuanced, messy scenarios in which student
options do not seem to have a clear ‘right option’. These are the
environments that our students will encounter in the real world.
Algorithmic simulations, by their nature, only provide feedback on the
black and white issues, never venturing into the complex areas that
Problem-Based Learning proponents have been advocating for years. For example, the entrepreneurial simulation simCEO (www.simceo.org)
asks students to create their own business plan and then adjust to
dynamic news. These student-created businesses form their own “classroom
market” and each student is presented with $10,000 dollars to invest in
the businesses of his/her choice. Strong ideas are rewarded as peers
buy more shares. Meaningful adjustments to the business plan along the
way are rewarded similarly. Of course, the inverse is true as well. In
our fictional Lemonade Stand, the student is focused on ‘outsmarting
the simulation’ by making the correct decisions. However, in a
simulation that stresses evaluation, understanding content (in an
academic sense) is not enough. Students must analyze the full scope of
the situation and communicate sound decisions, backed by knowledge, in a
way that persuades their peers. After all, isn’t that a better metric
for ‘simulating’ the real-world?